Harry Potter and the Military Industrial Complex
This is explored at length in the books. The wizard supremacists are an allegory for race supremacists, and it’s pointed out repeatedly that they’re delusional, broadly impotent, and small-minded. The death eaters believe so completely in their godhead and his divine right to rule that they neglect to consider even the most basic countermeasures or alternatives. There’s some “death of Stalin” paranoia but it’s overwhelmingly unforced incompetence.
Voldemort, likewise, blocks out even the potential for his lessers to outdo him. He is utterly infallible and his insecurities as an incest orphan to a fallen house will not allow him to feel any differently. Meanwhile, he’s been repeatedly circumvented and beaten by a group of teenagers, and his brewing plans will lead to the complete genocide of wizardkind upon reaching the world stage. It perfectly encapsulates the way race supremacists view the world and why they fail so frequently. The enemy is both strong and weak.
Darn shame rowling’s turned into what she hates. She wasn’t terrible at writing populism 101.
It comes down to how powerful static wards are, and how much technology just gets corrupted by magic. The real power of the wizards is memory and time manipulation. Close range is definitely in favor of wizards, you can’t surprise them unless they are intentionally careless. They can always go back a few hours and ambush you back. Chaos would ensue if they deleted every memory before 5 of a handful of leaders.
The tech killing thing is poorly defined, but hogwarts seems to disable electronic devices within a radius. If it’s similar to an emp, it may have countermeasures, but it’s hard to say they also work on magic. Operating within the radius of somewhere like that would be difficult.
There’s also the animagus issue. Every dog, cat, bird, or bug is a potential spy or assassin that is practically undetectable.
The big question is can spells stop a large bomb/nuke. Even if they couldn’t, it would be possible for wizards to escape the blast zone pretty easily, unless they couldn’t detect the attack.
I think the big weakness would be sniper fire that may be fast enough to prevent reactions at the borders of wards.
Ah yes, the good old solution of every contemporary fantasy world.
“modern technology just doesn’t work”
I mean, depending on the book, you have already accepted a number of ridiculous premises by real-world standards. It’s surprising to me that “and by the way, it interferes with or can be used to disable various kinds of technology” is where you would decide to roll your eyes.
Because it’s a cop out. You’re not putting any thought into how your systems would interact with modern tech. Even if you really need a modern setting with no technology, at least be imaginative with why that happens and maybe let that reason affect your setting in some other ways as well. It’s the difference between a world that feels real, messy and casual, and some hypothetical scenario you made to tell your story.
Harry potter isn’t the worst world for sure. Like Rowling does a pretty good job in explaining how wizards stay invisible from regular society, with the ministry of magic, their memory erasing and multiple incidents that all make it feel very real. But for technology we get little beyond Arthur weasly having a interest in collecting electric plugs or something.
There’s also no good logic or intuition about what technology does or doesn’t work. An electric kettle won’t work but a whole ass car will? It prevents any conflict that has technology involved from having stakes because you don’t have limits or an idea of what’s dangerous/important
There’s also no good logic or intuition about what technology does or doesn’t work. An electric kettle won’t work but a whole ass car will?
Sometimes the answer could be “hey, we don’t know everything there is to know about our magic. Sure would be nice to know why some kinds of tech are more affected than others, but our level of understanding isn’t there yet.”
Because it’s a cop out. You’re not putting any thought into how your systems would interact with modern tech. Even if you really need a modern setting with no technology, at least be imaginative with why that happens and maybe let that reason affect your setting in some other ways as well.
But maybe it doesn’t matter to the story. HP isn’t a role playing game (there probably is one now, but at the time it was created). There’s all kinds of things we didn’t and/or don’t fully understand about our real world. If they had defined the “rules” of HP magic in a way that satisfies the concern in your example, I don’t see how it would have impacted the story much. If anything it might have killed some of the fantastical bits of the storytelling. It’s not that sort of magic - I’d call it a “soft-ish” magic system if we’re going to define things that way. Muggle tech is unreliable around it - and Weasley had apparently done some kind of tinkering to kind of get the car to work because he was a geek like that. Works for me.
I get your points, I’m not trying to say you are wrong, I’m just saying the importance of that sort of detail can be kind of subjective. What I enjoy about the HP universe isn’t the slightest bit ruffled by that little bit of ambiguity. In a universe where the author really tried to keep things real feeling, I probably would be bothered, but there is so much more to criticize about HP before you get to muggle tech for someone who wants magical realism that it just seems like a weird stopping point to me.
Maybe you just prefer a hard magic system which is totally valid, but IMO that’s a matter of personal preference, not “correctness” if that makes any sense.
Yes, Rowling was pretty lazy about the edges of world building that weren’t directly related to her story.
That’s one of many many plot holes in Harry Potter.
There’s really no depth to the world building beyond, “What if British public schools taught magic?”
It doesn’t make sense in any context beyond that because the author never considered it from any context beyond that. Whenever you run into some crazy crap in HP and wonder, “Why TF would anyone do it that way?” The answer is almost always, "Because that’s how they do it in British public schools.
It’s also a bit odd that the spell so dangerous it was the absolute peak of the Dark Arts was a spell that just killed one person, and not even reliably. Where are the spells to call down meteors and cause earthquakes?
Finding plot holes in Harry Potter is like shooting fish in a barrel. There’s no challenge to it.
Rowling took “a wizard did it” as far as it can go.
It being based off of public schools is a bit odd given that Hogwarts is a boarding school.
That’s just the name.
In the UK, “public school” just means that admissions are generally open to the public. They’re still very expensive, are often boarding schools, and tend to have a lot of castles on their campuses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_school_(United_Kingdom)
Huh I was not aware of that. Very different from how that term is used in the US.
Yeah. It confused me at first too.
It’s not too bad when they use some word that we never use at all. I had no trouble figuring out what a “bellend” is.
It’s more of an issue when they use a word differently.
Me: “Yo blondie, that’s not how you’re supposed to wear condoms.”
Nigel Covington III: “You git, I most certainly do wear rubbers on my feet.”I thought “rubber” meant “eraser.”
“Fanny” is my favorite. Both referring to anatomy, but one is on the back and everyone has one while the other is on the front and only one sex has one.
I almost forgot “pants”.
Imagine the IRA, except they can fly, go invisible, or simply step into a phone booth or fireplace and vanish, and had an entire other dimension they could disappear into where they could be self sufficient.
Technology means nothing if you don’t even know who you enemy is.
Heck, they can mind control people, wipe their memories, or take a potion and assume their identity. It would be like fighting the Face Dancers from Dune if they were all trained in The Voice.
The reason Hermione is sworn to secrecy about the wizarding world is that they know if muggles found out there was a deep state, the revolution would be swift.
of course muggles would win a war against wizarding folk, that is why they made the international statue of secrecy (also cause jkr is a hack who never wants to bother extrapolating from the consequences of her own worldbuilding)
This is not clear cut. One teleport into a nuke silo + a brainwash spell = big problems
Edit (yes maybe one or two other brainwashes to get the proper codes forwarded)
Who’s to say some governments aren’t keenly aware of the wizarding world and they have their own protections and wizards
Teleport iceberg over person
Nothing beats gravity
But apparition becomes exponentially more difficult when you are bringing more with you. That’s why tandem apparations are licensed differently from regular, and why ron, who knew how to apparate, got splinched when he accidently brought yaxley(?)
That being said, most wizards do not understand the concept of electricity or the finer details of physics. So just post a video giving the wizards assassin’s your current location and wait for them to appear. Except your current location is in a room with an electric floor. Or filled with tear gas. They wouldn’t recognize a gas mask or know what rubber boots do.
Bubblehead charm and shield charm? And teargas wouldn’t much harm the effectiveness of a wizard who can do non-verbal casting. Unless they’re in a closed space with it for a loong time without any protection.
Also, the whole “wizards don’t understand muggle tech” doesn’t make sense seeing how many muggleborns there are. Like honestly, Hermione wouldn’t bring pencils/pens to school? Would pens not work in Hogwarts , as “muggle tech”? Pencils?
And how on Earth is it that non-muggle wizards into muggle shit can’t like, visit a library or purchase an encyclopedia? They clearly interact with the muggle world, and that’s not illegal, nor are muggle objects (unless you enchant them.)
The worst part is how muggle-borns can have siblings who aren’t wizards and how muggle-born kids seem to not be able to keep any of the friends they had before turning 11. That or we’re meant to believe 12-year olds wouldn’t boast about being actually magical to their best friends on their first vacation.
that’d be an issue, though nukes are pretty indiscriminate, and wizarding folk generally live among muggles, not in one isolated wizard country, which limits their usefulness. they can’t exactly nuke london without destroying diagon alley, and vice versa. plus, you need to know your destination pretty well to apparate, so there’d need to be some more involved infiltration beforehand.
Sure, I’m handwaving a lot, just saying the ability to manipulate minds and teleport to places (even with the kidnapped person) presents an x factor that is hard to overstate.
I’m not much of a harry potter fan but wasn’t that the whole point of being in hiding
They were being killed by muggles left and right, and this was way before the invention of guns, so, yeah, they weren’t winning that war in any case.
That’s a good point
Actually, at some point in the books they talk about this, and somebody comments how Muggles seldom would actually catch a real witch or wizard. And if they did, the witch or wizard would cast a spell to shield themselves from the fire and pretend to be in pain.
I cast “A belly full of lead”.
There’s a WP. Voldemort succeeds and then gets drunk on his own power and attempts to take over the muggle world (pure blood and all that) and he promptly gets his ass handed to him by the military.
Expecto AGM-114
WP ?
Writing Prompt
Obligatory Harry Potter With Guns trailer
This made me realize two things about Harry Potter. 1: why do the wizards not simply use magic AND guns? 2: oculus repairo is a stupid fucking spell. You’re telling me there’s a specific spell just for repairing glasses? That’s just bad writing.
You’ve never watched a teleshopping channel, have you? Reality is what’s bad writing.
I dled the whole thing. It’s awesome.
Harry got tired of drinking tea
Watching this on 1.5g of mushrooms was wild, would recommend
*most powerful spell kills upon striking
*is also clearly visible, dodgeable, and deflectable
Three words: Close Air Support.
1 GBU-39 would dust that steam engine wiping out whole generations of wizards. AIM-9 Sidewinders piloted by someone with confirmed kills for those weird skeleton death birds. Ezpz.
I personally think it depends on exactly what the limits of Magic are - it could be anything from Muggles eradicating Wizards, to the opposite, all very plausibly. To me, it comes down to the power of modern surveillance vs. the power of notice-me-not + space-expansion + anti-detection spells. Plus there’s a whole bunch of other powerful spells and devices (time turners, for example), but the muggles have a while fuckton of gold and other valuables to recruit these capabilities to their side as well.
I would also consider the logistics of war. There’s a military saying: novices study tactics, experts study logistics.
How long would it take to train a wizard to get to that level vs. a muggle with a gun? It feels like the classic knight vs. armed peasant situation.
That plus being able to cut off food supplies or infrastructure- just saying the US military was able to take out sadams military capabilities faster than he could react.
But the inverse also applies - there’s not much stopping wizards from portkeying/apparating into the Oval Office or the pentagon and magibombing them, or Avada-ing key targets. Wizards are probably the worst kind of guerrilla fighters - ones unchecked by range. And as far as food is concerned, food multiplication is a thing. I personally believe that in the long term, the way muggles would win would be through subverting wizards, not by pure overwhelming force.
Wizards win logistics, they can enchant a car to hold as much as a 747. They can teleport, fly, levitate, and banish things. Their biggest problem is raw numbers.
Alakablam!
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